[FR] Knit to tagged PDF

[AmeliaMN]

My learning management system flags documents for accessibility review, and all the PDF documents I knit from RMarkdown are flagged because they are not "tagged." Is there a chunk or document option to turn on to have a tagged PDF as the result? If not, would it be possible to implement?

[cderv]

Hi,

PDF are produced using LaTeX, and it seems LaTeX is not really accessible. I was not aware of tagged PDF until now and it seems this is very recent for LaTeX to consider improving to this. I found this post by the PDF association : https://www.pdfa.org/making-latex-produce-tagged-and-accessible-pdf/ It claims that this is currently under development or at least study and date of post is 27/01/2021.

Effort seems quite recent. Pandoc does not have specific support yet due to this limitation too: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/5409

This is definitely worth looking into, and gathering more information on how this would work (if it is in current state of LaTeX projects).

Thanks for opening the FR !

[markvenn]

This is an issue for many platforms now so please can we try tackle it? Thanks

[cderv]

Hi @markvenn,

We welcome any information on this topic. Is this already possible to produce such PDF using LaTeX ? If so, can we identify what is missing and possibly if related to Pandoc ?

Pandoc is doing for us the conversion to LaTeX and then we convert to PDF using a pdf engine from a LaTeX distribution. So I would think that this would need to be tackle in those layers but maybe I am missing something obvious and we can already do something at the rmarkdown level.

[markvenn]

I found this page: https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=995742&p=8207771 and it talks about possible ways around the issue. What I am doing in the mean time is creating my PDF files and then loading them into Acrobat and tagging them there manually. Not the best way of doing it but I would rather work in RStudio and use rmarkdown as much as possible. (I am starting to teach R next year so want to get as much experience with it now before I get asked awkward questions by undergrad students :) )